Pleasanton Real Estate - Marketing

Below, we have listed our beliefs in marketing a home:

We believe that each family selling their home has a unique situation. An effective marketing strategy should not be 'cookie cutter,' but should be specific to the property and the family: a condominium with uncooperative tenants should be handled differently than a million dollar home behind a gated community; a vacant home should be handled differently than one with newborn triplets just home from the hospital.

First and foremost, communication is key. We will keep in constant contact with you, and we will respond immediately to any questions you may have. We understand that we work for you, and we will conduct ourselves in a manner that places your needs first. We will assist you in completing all paperwork. We will go through the disclosure statements with you line-by-line. We will aggressively market your home. We will make sure that you understand all the implications of a contract before you sign it. We will communicate regularly with the Realtor© representing the person buying your home. We will be at all inspections. We will attend the escrow signing with you. We will assist in hiring any tradesmen that may be required, and we will monitor their work to ensure that you are getting what you pay for. In short, we will do whatever we can to make the home selling process as painless for you as possible.

The number one marketing strategy when selling your home is to place it on your local computerized Multiple Listing Service. We believe that all homes should be placed with the Multiple Listing Service. By using the Multiple Listing, every Realtor©(there are thousands) in the area is given the opportunity to find a buyer for your home. We do not believe it is in our customer's best interest for us to take an 'exclusive' listing (where the Broker tries to sell the home within their office without using the Multiple Listing Service). This approach is only good for the Broker and the buyer.

It is important to have a lock box and to ensure that viewing your home is made as convenient as possible for potential buyers. If you don't feel comfortable with a lock box, you still want to advertise your home through the Multiple Listing Service. Appointments can be set through you, or through us, as your Realtors©.

As a rule, the more potential buyers who know of, and see, your home, the better your chance of receiving top dollar. If you restrict the ability of potential buyers to view your home, you risk receiving less money. That is not to say that your individual circumstances don't necessitate the need to restrict showings, just understand that there may be a trade off in the dollar amount of the offer you receive. We have sold homes by directing Realtors© to contact us for access to the property (one nice thing about both of us being full time is that one of us is almost always available), and it has worked fine.

The internet has become an important marketing tool. Your listing should be advertised on all the major internet sites, and a strong presense on Realtor.com has become vital.

Staging your home is important. We will give you an honest assessment of what we believe you can do to make your home as attractive as possible to potential buyers.

Many potential buyers will judge your home based on their first impression. Most people are very 'visual:' they only think of a home by what they see. If the home is messy and the carpet is lime green, they will only remember it as the messy one with the lime green carpet, not as the one with the large yard on a quiet street. It is important that when a potential buyer drives up to the front of your house (and when they walk through the front door) they are favorably impressed. The cleaner the better. (Even the teenage boy's room). We know this can be inconvenient, but could translate into extra dollars for you. Less furniture is better. Visit model homes at new home construction sites. They hire professionals whose job it is to make a home look desirable to potential buyers. Note that there is very little furniture in these homes.

Turn lights on. Make the house look as light and open as possible.

You may want to hire a home stager. A home stager will tell you which furniture to take to storage, and will give you some excellent, inexpensive decorating tips. We will help with this also, but in some cases a professional home stager may be worth the money.

Print advertising and mailings should be customized for the home being sold. We send direct mailings to your neighbors because often they know of someone who has expressed an interest in the neighborhood. We send other mailings to targeted areas based upon the location and type of property being sold. For example, a mailing for a condo in Dublin, should be sent to local apartment complexes with the goal of finding a first time buyer. Mailings for an upper-end home in Pleasanton could be sent to specific neighborhoods in San Mateo where potential buyers would be attracted by the relatively low housing costs and local school test scores.

We use newspaper advertising outside the local market when appropriate. With many of our buyers now coming from the San Francisco Peninsula and Silicon Valley, it may be appropriate to advertise in newspapers servicing those areas.

Marketing materials should not only feature your home, but also your community. In most of the communities we cover, this means that we will emphasize school district test scores. It also means that we will market Pleasanton's downtown area, BART, The Ace Train, The Iron Horse Trail, San Ramon's community programs, etc. etc. More and more we are seeing Realtors© from out of our area bringing buyers to the Tri Valley. These Realtors© often don't know our market well enough to explain to their clients the plusses of our communities. We will put together a book for any potential buyer to take with them. It shows the highlights of your home and the positive attributes of the community.

Open Houses do work. We strongly believe in holding open houses. Many Realtors© will recite statistics stating that only one to three percent of homes sell from open houses. This is not true. For a home to be categorized as having sold through an open house, a potential buyer would have to attend the open house and buy that home through the Realtor© who has listed the property for sale. Admittedly, this happens very seldom. What does happen, is that potential buyers come through the open house, decide they like the home, and then call their own Realtor© to write an offer (it amazes us how many people come through an open house and comment that their Realtor© hasn't told them about the property). This type of sale does not get categorized as an open house sale and is registered as a regular transaction between Realtors©, but would not have happened without the open house. Also, it has happened to us that an out of town Realtor© had chosen a limited number of homes to show to relocation clients who were on a strict time frame; although they were not planning on seeing the property we had open, they followed our signs and wrote an offer that night.

Common sense dictates that the best way to get the most money for your home is to have the most potential buyers view it, and open houses are one way to get people who are thinking of purchasing a home to see it.

If at all possible, leave when a potential buyer is viewing. Your are only hurting yourself by walking them through the house and pointing out all the features. Your flyer should do that. The potential buyer will feel uncomfortable, and will be concentrating on you and not your home. They will leave quickly, without really taking the time to see what your home has to offer.

New carpet and paint. Several thousand dollars in new carpet and paint can make a huge difference. We do not believe in offering an allowance for carpeting. This defeats the entire purpose. Since you are willing to spend the money, put the carpet in now. You want the house to be at its full potential when it is shown.

In the current seller's market, you want your home to be available for a full weekend. We believe you should put your home on the market towards the end of the week, and, if at all possible, offers should not be accepted before Sunday night. This gives you the best opportunity to receive multiple offers. There is some risk involved in this approach (someone who wants to buy your home on Friday, may have found another one by Sunday), but specific contracts can be considered on a case-by-case basis.

The Broker's Tour is an important tool in generating interest in your home.The Broker's Tour is an open house held during the week (each city has its own day) when the Realtors© in the area have a chance to view homes that recently came on the market. This is an important event because there are Realtors© who may not think your home will fit the needs of their client, but change their mind once they see it on the Broker's Tour.